(a) Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to plastic cards and methods of affixing indicia thereto.
(b) Background of the Invention
This invention relates to a combined medical/informational identification credit card and to a method of manufacturing such cards. Medical/i.d. cards resemble credit cards in appearance. They accommodate an informational chip such as a microfilm insert containing medical history and/or credit data concerning the cardholder. By present standards of production, a card is produced with several steps which are time-consuming and hence expensive. For example, to emboss the name of the cardholder on the card after a microfilm chip is inserted, an operation requiring thirty to forty seconds per card is required, thereby cutting down production of the producer to sixty to seventy cards per hour. With such a card, for example, a three-ply lamination is provided in which the center core is apertured to receive a piece of microfilm. The two outside panels are transparent. The three laminations are heat-laminated for fusion and then the cardholder's name is mechanically inscribed upon the card. Because the microfilmed document is not readable by the human eye without separate viewer equipment, verification of the microfilm data with the personal and/or credit data about to be embossed into the card must be a separate step for each card. Further, if this time-consuming verification step is omitted, a single microfilm card being "out of sequence" with the embossing operator's index list, could result in all the following cards being embossed with the wrong identification data. Thus, both the embossing time and the cost of microfilm processing, inserting, and laminating would be wasted.
In the case of most medical institutions, a number corresponding to a credit card identification is a computer-generated number which is also computer correctable through means of various codes with preassigned values to each digit. If such numbers are duplicated manually, considerable human error is embodied in the process.
In the laminated card technology, there is also a technique known as spot laminating which has been common in the "laminating pouch" industry in the form of either two heat seals or a thin strip seal across one edge of the unit for the sole purpose of positioning the outside laminates of a unit together.